Present in the French capital for the opening of the Global Forum on Vaccine Sovereignty and Innovation (GAVI), Senegal’s president took the floor on Thursday 20 June to remind the meeting of “the enormity of the task that remains to ensure Africa’s vaccine sovereignty.”
Addressing his African peers and their host, Emmanuel Macron, Bassirou Diomaye Faye noted that the continent accounts for around 20 percent of the world’s population, yet “its vaccine industry supplies barely 0.25 percent of the world’s supply,” meaning that it is “still largely dependent on other regions to meet its needs.”
“One of the major challenges for Africa today is to produce vaccines, medicines and diagnostics, but also to gain access to marketing platforms so that it can play a full role in the fight against future health threats,” said the Senegalese leader, recalling that the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted the structural disparities between developed and developing countries in terms of vaccination.
With this in mind, the African Union has set itself the goal of producing 60 percent of the vaccines used on the continent by 2040. To achieve this, it hopes to mobilise “more than a billion dollars” with its partners, the GAVI Alliance, which has helped vaccinate more than half the world’s children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases over the past twenty years, and the European Union, to accelerate vaccine production in Africa.
The Pasteur Institute in Dakar, with the support of the Senegalese government, has launched an industrial development programme worth an estimated $252 million, said the fifth Senegalese leader who was elected on 24 March, with a scheme to make health “a permanent priority.”
He noted that the construction of infrastructure and the acquisition of equipment were “being finalised.” In the same vein, the Diamniadio Vaccinopole site, one of the entities of the programme, will have a production capacity of 300 million doses of routine, epidemic or pandemic vaccines using three technological platforms, including messenger RNA.
“To provide a framework for all these initiatives, Senegal has already created the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (ARP), which has worked hard to achieve the necessary maturation and approval phases,” said President Faye, urging greater financial support for the GAVI Alliance, one of the organisers of the forum along with the African Union and France on behalf of Europe.
The meeting, held at the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French foreign affairs ministry, brought together representatives of African countries, donors, the pharmaceutical industry, civil society and international organisations.
In addition to Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who will have a private meeting with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace later in the day, the presidents of Ghana, Rwanda and Botswana are also in Paris.
ODL/ac/lb/as/APA